TWG 210: Vanilla Ice Cream in Sprite [GAME THREAD]

[the sun fan]

Originally Posted by star-crossed

To sun fan, in light of your radical honesty here,

I guess I've been in the community for a long time now really, but I spent a long time being, you know, a newcomer, trying to wrap my head around the lingo and the meta reads and all. It's hard to put into words what it feels like to read that my mentor, the person who I spent all those games building my world views from theirs, say they think I'm better than them at town.

I have slightly different strengths than you, I think. I at least think of myself as stylistically adjacent to Haku, where I don't necessarily have the charisma and composure to lead, but I will always drive information and I will always drive re-evaluation. I will always try to say how I got to where I got, because I want people to engage with it and tell me how I'm wrong, that's how we get better. People probably trust me more than you too because I've never burned them for it, and that decreases the pool of wolves for them. I believe I get killed at night so often because I am hard to vote off and because I help town play more cohesively, because I bring out strengths in others, more than I get killed for necessarily being right. It does feel good every once in a while when I'm very right, but yeah.

It's from our dynamic really that I felt so strongly about Ben too, is that I felt Ben would have to be actually playing out of his fucking mind to come back rusty and post like he was as a wolf with certain emotional nuances he was hitting, and you actually know him really well and were getting to the same spot but based on different posts. He engaged with my manifesto in a way that was real to me. Even if you were a wolf, you believed your town read on him. That's how I saw it.

It's not very often I actually get to be a counterwagon. One of the last times, it was your fault, I believe. It makes it a little more emotional when one of your top town reads gets voted off over you. It's my turn, really, to be the one mislynched. I said it before, but I think potentially multiple wolves saw him as more low hanging fruit, an easier place to justify having had their vote. I am forever on a revenge tour, I want to make the wolf team suffer as much as I do trying to find them. I want them to regret having the audacity to leave me alive with this combination of people.

You wanted to know how I saw the future? I said it before, but I thought the game was starting Friday morning my time and not Saturday. I had Friday off, got my latest town role PM. I had felt that I might be ready for another wolf rand this time, as scary as this playerlist is, because I do want another chance someday at it, to see if I can be part of making a beautiful puzzle for you all to stress over the way you all have done for me all these years. So I was a little disappointed.

I was supposed to be writing an essay in relation to the qualification I'm doing, and I did write most of it that day, but I also ended up writing a WAY longer version of the manifesto than what I actually posted in the thread, like three times as long, because I was kind of trying to work through in my head what it means to be town in a setup without blues, because I have never done it before. My fear was basically was that town would fall into despair over feeling like they have nothing going for them, and not really get engaged with the game, and if we don't want it as much as the wolves do, we lose the information war and it's a crapshoot. So it was an interesting thought experiment for me, and something I was excited to be able to use as an icebreaker for d0 because I truly think the sooner we get to genuine game-related discussion, the better.

I would argue that I would have been thinking about completely different things, had I finally rolled wolf for the first time in several years. As you note in this post, I am unfortunately the most polarised player in this community. Voted off unceremoniously D0 as an outted wolf D0 spamming gold stinger cop gifs, never been voted off as a town player. It's not that I just like didn't put the time in or that I made one big slip or anything in Kiss and Kill. It was actually that I was super hungover and not feeling well, and I decided to force a bunch of posts hoping to seem off the cuff and power through it because that's what I assume I would've done if I rolled town. But then, because I was nervous and not at my best, I got a ton of negative attention for the uncanny valley of my posting. I had limited practice at defending myself from previous games because typically that's not an issue for me. So then I got shot, voted off, and doomed my very competent and wonderful wolf partner from what could have been probably an easy win if she'd rolled wolf with almost anyone else. Anyway, I imagine I might've spent Friday planning about how I might be able to correct my past mistakes, ease myself in and mimic my townplay without putting myself in a position to be likely to get negative attention and crumble from it.

Sorry, did I ever actually answer how I saw the future? Well, partly it's just statistics. 25% of the players D0 are wolves in this, and so because we don't talk about literally every player all the time, we are going to run into times where people are just talking about the wrong things because there's too many possibilities. I genuinely think it can come across to wolves like it's happening because because they're playing well, and it doesn't hurt if they are. But mostly it's just math, the game would be boring if we could overcome that math so easily.

Partly it's that history repeats itself. Lying is a cognitive load and it's a burden over these long phases. I think wolves tend to distance and give townreads on town more often than people assume because of it, because they are biased by the answers they already have. When they try to emulate their town game, they don't emulate all their flaws. A couple of people said that bit was fluffy. To me, it's a fundamental truth about the game that I think could be important in how this one plays out too.

xoxo, star-crossed

see like
this is part of why I wanted to talk before the game began, how am I supposed to be so honest with this. It is tough to take this and attempt to respond to it while maintaining... normalcy? I am not sure what the word is.

There was once a game where someone had the role that let me talk with them all night phase. We talked for hours, genuinely a lot about the game, like for at least 4 hours straight we talked about the game in that discord room. We basically ran out of things to talk about that were game related, and we talked about some family stuff that, through complete coincidence, we had something very unusual, unfortunate and uncommon happen to our respective younger brothers. It was some real shit, in short.

We talked for I think it was 7 hours in total. Neither of us got much sleep. At the very end, when things were winding down, he mentioned that, on the previous night phase, the player he had targeted had told him that they were a power role.

It completely changed the course of night actions for my wolf team, and we absolutely decimated town that night with what we learned because of that (I was able to be in both wolfchat and this chat at the same time). It created a scenario where not only did the town have to kill only wolves for the rest of the game, because of the nature of the power roles, they needed to kill the wolves in a (relative) specific order. I didn't even know the term for this, I have since learned it is called viglo (vigilante or lose). In my mind, I called it "Getting Fucked." We won the next day, we didn't even lose another wolf, even though we actually missed a win where we could have insta'd a non-vigilante wolf earlier in the day.

It obviously felt good to win the game, but it genuinely had me messed up that we learned the last bit of info that possibly could have ruined us after I was talking to this person for this amount of time, and after we talked about real shit for so long. I talked to him immediately after the game ended, and he said he had in his mind to tell me that role thing at any point; he had already been thinking I was town, otherwise he wouldn't have targeted me. I... don't know if this is true. Perhaps. I'll never truly know, and maybe it is better to just believe him.

Sometimes, the waters of the game get muddied. It can feel not so good.

My point is, I love this game, and as you mentioned earlier, I sometimes love to hate it. Lying can become a burden. I have upset some of my friends by playing this game. Creating the beautiful puzzle is one of my favorite things to do, and part of why I think I eventually came to prefer wolf to town in some setups (normally I didn't really care what I rolled)

I have made people cry, I have had friends not talk to me for a little while, and though I am truly thankful it hasn't happened to me, I have seen others friendships disintegrate.

It fucking sucks. In a similarish game to werewolf, I cried a lot because I felt I hurt people, it was part of why I stayed away from this for a while after. I felt like an asshole. I knew it was part of the game, I knew that such things are only meant to be in passing, but I knew I was going to upset people, and I did them anyway, and in short, it made me feel like an asshole. I had to do it at the same time.

It was sickening.

I hope you find rolling wolf to be a joyful thing whenever it occurs. It almost always is, at least for me. It just sucks sometimes to tell lies.

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I will bury my townread of you for this post within this wall of text, whoever can stomach the post will find it. If I say you can be a wolf or something, know that I don't mean it. It is possible that I don't even take that line. I don't know how I am meant to explain my townread on you for this post beyond "radical honesty." No one believed my read on ben and it was at least on the same branch of the tree, but obviously it wasn't the same exact thing. I don't think you can be a wolf this game, I think I got there. If you are, you probably have some off-site experience that allowed you to level up like the time chamber in Dragon Ball (I never really saw it).
If not, that must've been one HECK of a hangover in that turbo, only a tiny bit of a joke.

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We've all marveled at how remarkable it is for you to have rolled villager to this proportion. I haven't really thought about how it can have had this effect on your psyche. I, too, know that you are probably imbalanced as a player, but like
we don't actually know. I'm sure deep in my memory was the fact that you were hung over in that wolf game. Genuinely, I think you'll do well whenever you roll wolf. If there is anything, I think it is a testament to the game moderators on FFR actually fucking randomizing the game instead of just assigning the roles they want, which makes me feel good. You're too smart, too wordy and too adept to not succeed whenever the day should come. Just like how you postulated that, if I am a wolf, I believed my townread on ben, and I think that it would be true if I was a wolf, yeah. If I can do it, you can too. There's no way you can't learn.

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I don't remember the time it was my fault that you were a counterwagon, unless you're slyly saying that was this game. It was probably stupid then, too. At least it was long enough ago for most everyone else to have forgotten. I thought I had more to say here, I guess I don't.

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I... still don't get how you predicted the future with such accuracy. It is one thing to say "yeah town is going to mislynch" but this was "times will appear good, but they will turn bad" with parlays and like
you can claim that's just playing the odds, but it doesn't make any sense. I do not think most mislynches are like what happened with Ben. It is a personal philosophy of mine that "no one deserves anything," something I was kind of shocked to see I had implanted the mindset of within my scrabble rival that I was telling you about. Ben didn't deserve what happened, as DBP commented earlier. It was more tragic than usual. If you can tell that just from the flow, you have that mah jong sense that I hear myth about.

I knew it didn't matter how you did it, but it has shaken me, truly.

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Do me a favor and don't post like this to me again in this game, I feel horrible not responding to them but I might have to not respond in the future. This doesn't really help anyone a ton, it is nice to have you shored up, but I can just read that and get there. I guess I can take some solace in knowing that, had my vote for ben mattered, it would have led to this, which is what I wanted and hoped would occur.

I find your wording of "get to be a counterwagon" very funny, as if it is a privilege.

The last thing I'll say is, I've thought you were a better town player than me for years. I'd swear I have told you as much. Perhaps you thought I might've been humble at the time or some such and not meant it; I did.